BERNARD DE MANDEVILLE

[Very little is known in detail of the life of Bernard Mandeville or de Mandeville, one of the most notorious and best abused writers of the earlier 18th century. He appears to have been born at Dort, in Holland, about 1670, and to have died in London in January 1733. His father was a physician, and Mandeville was well educated at Rotterdam and Leyden. It does not seem to be known when or why he came to London; but he must have done so pretty early. He practised physic, it would seem, to the end of his life; but never appears to have attained a sufficient position to have a house of his own. One of the very rare personal traditions about him says that he was pensioned by the distillers to write in favour of their wares a statement not quite reconcilable with divers passages in his works, unless we are to take these as an attempt at blackmailing. Another is his picturesque and pregnant description of Addison as "a parson in a tie-wig." By his own account he wrote, before the end of the seventeenth century, a short poem in very rough but rather vigorous octosyllabics, entitled The Grumbling Hive. This is a fable wherein the corrupt practices which made a hive of bees populous and prosperous, and the reformation which improved their morals and put an end to their prosperity, are successively recounted. Bibliography however does not seem to know any edition before 1705. The piece, according to Mandeville, was both bought and pirated; but it was not till he reprinted it in 1714 with divers prose additions that it attracted much attention. This increased till, after yet another enlarged reprint in 1723 as The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits, it was presented by the Grand Jury and drew many replies, the fiercest and most severe of which was Law's Remarks, while later Berkeley also attacked it very bitterly in Alciphron. Mandeville, who was not afflicted with bashfulness, continued to enlarge his work till in the so-called ninth edition (Edinburgh, 1755) it fills two small but closely printed volumes of nearly four hundred pages each, the first containing the Fable and its original prose appendices ("Remarks," a 'Vindication," a "Tract of Charity Schools," which excited Law's special wrath, and other things), while the second is filled with Dialogues on what the author probably regarded as a tolerably complete system of ethics, including what we now barbarously call sociology. Mandeville's entire works have never been collected; and the very titles of some of them sufficiently indicate a moral purpose of very dubious sincerity. Even the others, except the Fable itself, are not easy to obtain, and in some cases are almost certainly spurious. Of these last is The World Unmasked, a considerable book giving itself out as translated from the French and published in 1736. Of the remainder An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and The Use

fulness of Christianity in War, continue the dialogues of the second part of the Fable with the same personages and in the same spirit. Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness, 1720, is also evidently genuine : the others need not be mentioned.]

THE FABLE OF THE BEES which, with its more immediate
appendices, contains almost everything of Mandeville's that is of
importance to any but the curious, is one of those unlucky books
which have become known to posterity chiefly by the polemical
efforts of others to suppress them. And as Law and Berkeley, to
name these only, were infinitely greater as well as infinitely better
men than Mandeville, the state of the latter under this dispensa-
tion is not gracious. Curiously enough the justest as well as the
acutest estimate of him in his own century comes from Johnson,
who was not wont to be very kind either to writers of doubtful
morality or to those of scarcely doubtful unorthodoxy.
In a con-
versation not many years before his death, he hit the real blot in
Mandeville's ingenious sophism by pointing out that "he defines
neither vices nor benefits." He also declared that Mandeville,
whom he must have read not long after the hubbub of 1723 itself,
"did not puzzle him, but opened his views into real life very
much." And indeed the natural indignation which men like
Law and Berkeley must have felt at the extreme coarseness of tone
which characterises Mandeville, at the excessively low views of
human nature which he habitually takes, at his utter lack of rever-
ence, of sense of beauty, of feeling for whatsoever dignifies and
ennobles life, must be admitted to have made them somewhat un-
fair to him. His protestations of orthodox intention, or at least of
freedom from all intentional unorthodoxy, are indeed, like most such
protests in the 18th century, to be taken with something more than
grave suspicion. His doctrine that private vices are public bene-
fits-in other words that avarice, luxury, unjust wars, and so forth
conduce to the welfare of the body politic-may have been partly
due, as Johnson points out, to a neglect to define his terms, and
was partly also no doubt wilful paradox. His ethical and political
philosophy, so far as he has any, is Hobbism degraded. And the
coarseness before referred to a coarseness which does not consist
so much in the use of offensive language as in an almost incredi-
ble vulgarity and foulness of tone, in the dragging in of offensive
illustrations at every opportunity, in studious belittling and defil-
ing of motive and sentiment and feeling-is disgusting enough.
But there seems little doubt that his original object was to ridicule

and decry the sentimental and genteel finicalness of Shaftesbury's notion of virtue; and there is no doubt at all that with all his drawbacks he possesses a certain hard rough common sense and acuteness which are very uncommon. He has among other Mephistophelean characteristics that of being detestable, but not despicable; and, though utterly blind to high things, he sees low things with a clearness that is frequently astonishing and almost admirable.

It is his form, however, that concerns us here, and in this also he is not despicable. His verse is very uncouth, and his prose is frequently incorrect and never in any way polished; but he makes up for this by many of the merits of Defoe, to whom in character as in period he is very close. Many of his characters -the special knack of the time-possess great felicity and truth of touch; his argument, sophistical as it commonly is, is put with a good deal of surface clearness and cogency; and his illustrations and digressive passages have singular liveliness and force. They are indeed frequently unpleasant (there is a passage describing a swine devouring a child which any French naturalist of the younger school might be proud of); but the sketches of the crowd before the gallows at Newgate, that on gin-selling and gin-drinking given below, and others in no small numbers scattered about his works show a vividness of narrative and almost dramatic presentation worthy of writers of far higher traditional repute. Nor is he less considerable as a satirist, and the "Parable of Small Beer" in his Remarks is worthy of Arbuthnot, if not even of Swift. The proverb about the commoner words of our language being "good Yorkshire and good Friese," is certainly confirmed by the vigour and ease with which this Dutchman uses the English vernacular. And though his sudden and not very savoury notoriety tempted him to indulge in long and dull dissertations where the merit of his style is spun too thin to cover the nakedness of his sophistry, he must still at his best remain a striking exemplar of one of the most nervous if not the most elegant periods of English writing, and deserve a place in the division of English prose history which includes Latimer and Bunyan, Defoe and Cobbett.

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

THE GENESIS OF VANITY

WHEN the incomparable Sir Richard Steele, in the usual elegance of his easy style, dwells on the praises of his sublime species, and with all the embellishments of rhetoric sets forth the excellency of human nature, it is impossible not to be charmed with his happy turns of thought, and the politeness of his expressions. But though I have been often moved by the force of his eloquence, and ready to swallow the ingenious sophistry with pleasure, yet I could never be so serious but, reflecting on his artful encomiums, I thought on the tricks made use of by the women that would teach children to be mannerly. When an awkward girl, before she can either speak or go, begins, after many entreaties, to make the first rude essays of courtseying, the nurse falls into an ecstasy of praise ; "There's a delicate curtsey! O fine Miss ! There's a pretty lady! Mamma! Miss can make a better curtsey than her sister Molly!" The same is echoed over by the maids, whilst mamma almost hugs the child to pieces: only Miss Molly, who being four years older, knows how to make a very handsome curtsey, wonders at the perverseness of their judgment, and, swelling with indignation, is ready to cry at the injustice that is done her, till, being whispered in the ear that it is only to please the baby, and that she is a woman, she grows proud at being let into the secret; and rejoicing at the superiority of her understanding, repeats what has been said with large additions, and insults over the weakness of her sister, whom all this while she fancies to be the only bubble among them. These extravagant praises would, by any one above the capacity of an infant, be called fulsome flatteries, and, if you will, abominable lies; yet experience teaches us, that by the help of such gross encomiums, young misses will be brought to make pretty curtsies, and behave themselves womanly much sooner, and with less trouble, than they would without them. 'Tis the same with boys, whom they'll

strive to persuade, that all fine gentlemen do as they are bid, and that none but beggar boys are rude, or dirty their clothes; nay as soon as the wild brat with his untaught fist begins to fumble for his hat, the mother, to make him pull it off, tells him, before he is two years old, that he is a man, and if he repeats that action when she desires him, he's presently a captain, a lord mayor, a king, or something higher, if she can think of it; till, egged on by the force of praise, the little urchin endeavours to imitate man as well as he can, and strains all his faculties to appear what his shallow noddle imagines he is believed to be.

DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND

DECIO, a man of great figure, that had large commissions for sugar from several parts beyond sea, treats about a considerable parcel of that commodity with Alcander, an eminent West India merchant; both understood the market very well, but could not agree: Decio was a man of substance, and thought nobody ought to buy cheaper than himself; Alcander was the same, and not wanting money, stood for his price. Whilst they were driving their bargain at a tavern near the exchange, Alcander's man brought his master a letter from the West Indies, that informed him of a much greater quantity of sugars coming for England than was expected. Alcander now wished for nothing more than to sell at Decio's price, before the news was public; but being a cunning fox, that he might not seem too precipitant, nor yet lose his customer, he drops the discourse they were upon, and, putting on a jovial humour, commends the agreeableness of the weather, from whence falling upon the delight he took in his gardens, invites Decio to go along with him to his country house, that was not above twelve miles from London. It was in the month of May, and as it happened upon a Saturday in the afternoon, Decio who was a single man, and would have no business in town before Tuesday, accepts of the other's civility, and away they go in Alcander's coach. Decio was splendidly entertained that night, and the day following; the Monday morning, to get himself an appetite, he goes to take the air upon a pad of Alcander's, and coming back meets with a gentleman of his acquaintance,